NOTES for Mar 6:53-56

On the one hand, Jesus truly reveals to us a God who accepts us as we are - with all our illnesses, needs, psychological hang-ups, childhood complexes..., and regardless of any supposed merits of ours or our unworthiness. All this is true, as it is also true that through faith and striving toward God many problems are sometimes resolved, illnesses are healed, or we become able, which is perhaps no less valuable, to look at all these hardships of life differently, as they say, through God's own eyes, to understand their meaning and draw benefit from them. And without doubt this last thing too can be related to what today's Gospel passage calls "healings," if by them we mean divine actions through which our mind, our whole life, though still far from the ideal, begins to acquire a certain wholeness, and we become able to rise above the problems that oppress us and comprehend something new and unexpected about life, about God.

On the other hand, one gets the impression that despite the enormous number of scenes of healings and other miracles in the Gospel, Mark, following the Spirit and the intentions of Jesus, wanted to say something else as well. Recovery or changes for the better may happen or may not happen, although in any case hope for the best remains; however, in the depth of all these longings or disappointments there is hidden a call addressed to every person: to look to the root and try to perceive with one's whole being that suffering and distress are synonyms of human life. And overcoming them is possible only by shifting our attention from our own sores to the suffering and pain of other people, as Jesus did. For sharing in the suffering of others can act as an anesthetic for our own suffering, and at the same time helps make life more bearable and, most importantly, not deprived of consolations and of joy shared with others.